Ryoji Ikeda
macrocosms
decemberdec 7
© Henri Vogt ©
© Maanus Kullamaa – Tartu ©
© Henri Vogt ©
Sunday december 7
18h
100 cymbals (2019)
Les Percussions de Strasbourg
Alexandre Babel, Amélie Grould, Stéphane Garin percussion
Students from the conservatories of Paris and Lyon
music for choir (2024) – French premiere
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir
Tõnu Kaljuste conductor
music for organ (2025) – commissioned by the Philharmonie de Paris and the Festival d’Automne à Paris. World premiere.
Shin-Young Lee organ
Musicians from ONCEIM
This concert is co-presented by the Philharmonie de Paris and the Festival d’Automne à Paris.
With the support of
This second concert dedicated to the acoustic work of the digital virtuoso Ryoji Ikeda, invites audiences to three unique listening experiences. Ten percussionists coordinate with each other to choreographic-like effect, as though they were the different parts of a same instrument. The concert also features a choir piece, a first for the composer, and a new work for the Philharmonie de Paris organ.
Expanding on an earlier work, 100 cymbals is an installation-based piece, by virtue of its chessboard-like staging of 10 x 10 metal discs at waist height, positioned across the playing space with absolute precision. But it is also a performance piece, in which ten musicians form a whole, even though each of them follows the paths indicated to them by a colourful score. The three movements vibrate with the fusion of bows, soft sticks, which resonate with the metal surfaces to prayer bowl-effect, and hard sticks for harsher timbres. In 2024, Ryoji Ikeda went back to Estonia, where he studied different sciences, and composed music for choir. We hear an angel's voice, coloured birds, light and night, similar to the 0 and 1 of computer science-based language and quantum information, in which these numbers are superimposed, as well as Panta Rhei by Heraclitus. Indeed, everything flows, everything moves in a certain rhythm.
See also
In the same place